TransH4ck tries to help transgender people in tech industry

The Cool or Nah app created at the hackathon could help people like Rachel Robinson, who said she has felt uncomfortable vibes when she has visited some businesses and areas.

The Cool or Nah app created at the hackathon could help people like Rachel Robinson, who said she has felt uncomfortable vibes when she has visited some businesses and areas.

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Kenya Boudreaux, a 19-year-old SFSU student studies for midterms at a desk in the school library, on Thursday, March 3, 2016, in San Francisco, California.

Kenya Boudreaux, a 19-year-old SFSU student studies for midterms at a desk in the school library, on Thursday, March 3, 2016, in San Francisco, California.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle

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S.F. State student Kenya Boudreaux participated in the recent hackathon, which was designed to help transgender people of color.

S.F. State student Kenya Boudreaux participated in the recent hackathon, which was designed to help transgender people of color.

Photo: Gabrielle Lurie Gabrielle Lurie, Special To The Chronicle

TransH4ck tries to help transgender people in tech industry

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Kenya Boudreaux met a guy on a dating site. She liked his photo, his personality. She agreed to meet him in person. That’s when things got weird.

He wanted to wander down alleys. He pressured Boudreaux, 19, to drink.

“It made me feel very unsafe,” said Boudreaux, a black transgender woman and student at San Francisco State University.

Last year, 23 trans women and gender nonconforming people were murdered. Most of them were black or Latino.

“There’s already this life expectancy of we probably won’t make it past 35 years old,” she said recently. “That’s very harrowing for me, so I feel like if I do end up murdered, I want that person found and charged.”

So Boudreaux, a mechanical engineering and computer science student, got to work making an app to help with just that.

For Boudreaux and others, creating technology to respond to the needs of transgender people — particularly black transgender people — is a kind of activism. Doing so in the Bay Area, where, numerous people said, being black and trans still invites difficulties and discrimination, is a way of providing support for one another.

Last week, Boudreaux and more than a dozen others participated in a hackathon to build “solutions to social problems unique to transgender people of color.” It was organized by TransH4ck, an Oakland organization that acts as a hub and a home for transgender and gender nonconforming folks and allies in the tech industry. The organization encourages the creation of open-source technology for this population.

Crime targets

The National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs has reported that 72 percent of hate crimes against LGBT people were against trans women, and 90 percent of them were women of color.

“There are so many tools that black trans people need,” said TransH4ck founder Kortney Ziegler. “And it’s awesome we can come together and in one day build an app that people can download for free to make their lives a little better and a little easier.”

Ziegler, a black transgender man, started TransH4ck in 2013 after raising more than $6,000 in a GoFundMe campaign. A year later, TransH4ck received an $85,000 grant from venture capitalist Marc Andreessen and wife Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen.

Since then, the group has hosted several hackathons and launched more than 30 projects meant to address problems specific to transgender people, including employment and income disparities, homelessness and discrimination.

Boudreaux sat in the second row as Ziegler and Tiffany Mikell, TransH4ck’s tech director, spoke about issues faced by the trans community and the mission of their organization. She said it was the first time she’d been to a hackathon — though she tries to attend several each month — where she’s felt so welcomed.

It was the first time she felt safe discussing her app: a black box of sorts for transgender women that would record and keep information stored in a virtual vault that can be accessed only by its original user, or a trusted contact if the user doesn’t check in to the app after a set period in time. This, Boudreaux said, could allow trans women to record where they were and who they were with in the event that something happens.

“Even in such a liberal industry, antiblackness and transphobia are still things we have to grapple with,” she told the group, which consisted of transgender men and women of different races.

Helpful app

Rachel Robinson, 26, sat in the back row nodding. It was her first hackathon, though she had been keeping an eye on TransH4ck for months.

The app that participants created that day, Cool or Nah, will provide a trans-specific Yelp-like rating system that can alert other transgender people about whether a place — a business, a park, a city — is welcoming and friendly or somewhere to avoid. The information will be crowdsourced and then mapped so users can zoom out to see the overall dynamics of an area.

Robinson offered several of her own experiences as examples: a massage parlor where she felt ogled and singled out because of her body, a part of town where she feels like she stands out.

“For me, there came a point when my transness started becoming a major factor in where I would go, when I would go and why,” she said. “When I was first starting out (life as a transgender woman), it would have been great to see a heat map of places that are cool and places that aren’t.”

Robinson, who lives in San Jose and works in Cupertino as an applications engineer for vision systems company Cognex, said she moved to the Bay Area specifically to be in a more welcoming community as she transitioned.

Still, she’s encountered problems.

“Sometimes, particularly in tech, it’s hard to tell whether people are treating you a certain way because you’re trans or because you’re a woman,” said Robinson, who is white and acknowledges that allows her to skirt the racial bias that others, like Boudreaux, discussed.

“I feel unsafe while I’m out in the world at least once a day,” Robinson said. “That sensation of feeling unsafe when you’re alone outside at night was literally one of the very first changes that happened to me as I began to transition. It’s an immediate thing, and for me it happened before I even looked any different.”

Getting involved

That’s why she felt compelled to participate in a group for creating transgender-focused technology. At the end of the hackathon, she volunteered to be the Cool or Nah “champion,” or the person who will help see the project through to fruition.

Technology, she said, has the potential to become a great equalizer. Boudreaux and Ziegler feel the same.

“Social justice can be addressed in the tech frontier,” Boudreaux said. “When we tap into issues we’re aware of because we live it, we can, hopefully, make a real difference in other peoples’ lives.”